[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Then there came a moving glimmer of tiny fights.The scene sharpened and Nelson could make out black shapes, the dark forms of long spaceships moving in.And he suddenly realized that there were not just a few, but hundreds, even thousands of giant spaceships in that fleet!"Our first indication of the cosmic plague was when some refugee spaceships arrived at our neighbor worlds.We saw them through our observatories."The panel showed two or three odd craft circling into a Vegan world, accompanied by the squarish craft native to that planet."These refugees came from stars beyond our own.None of our neighbors had ever developed star flight, but these strangers came among them with their terrible story.They had been war-craft of some far-off system, and one day there had come into their system this tremendous fleet of terrible black ships.These ships had destroyed all that came before them.They had landed on their worlds and out of them came huge armies of terrible creatures who robbed and burned, and killed everything in their way."Kunosh stopped, his voice emotionally out of control.Nelson could feel the silence in the room, the horror at the scenes which were being shown on the panel.There, before his eyes, he could see cities burning and falling, huge masses of shapeless terror swamping the fields and houses, crowds of terrified people fleeing vainly only to be burned down!He caught his breath."Are these actual scenes?" he asked."No," Kunosh replied."How could they be? They are artists' reproductions of the accounts given by the few who escaped.But they are faithfully made."Our ancestors were disturbed at this, very disturbed.Our neighbor worlds began to arm against them.They were devoting all their efforts to building war fleets and defenses.But we were not going to do that.To do such terrible things would be to sink to the level of animals.It would destroy our civilization.And besides it was obviously futile.These Marauders, as we called them, apparently were traveling the universe to ruin and pillage and rob.There were thousands of their big ships and they must have been armed beyond all our conceptions!"We didn't know how long it would be before they arrived at Vega and killed us all! We thought we had a few years, and we finally decided that the only smart thing to do would be to flee.We didn't have spaceships but we knew all about them.We knew we could make them.Our science was advanced enough."We held a great conference in our world and we talked it over until we decided what to do/'The scene showed a large underground cavern with hundreds of the rabbity men in heated debate."We built two giant spaceships in the form of two great big spheres.These ships were large enough to carry many thousands of people.Inside them they had room for factories and storehouses, synthetic farms, and all the things needed to carry on life entirely within them without need of sun or surface."The screen showed two tremendous frameworks going up, being filled in, being surfaced.Nelson gasped as he realized that he was looking at ships larger than any about which he had ever dreamed.By comparing them with the mountains nearby, he saw that the two ships towered above them, that the men who were building them seemed smaller than ants.Why—he gasped—they were the sizes of the two moons of Mars IHis suspicion was confirmed as the artificial globes were surfaced.The outside of the two vessels was made to look like barren rocks and cold stony plain.Before his eyes the contours of Deimos and Phobos took shape!Kunosh went on: "We were just in time.As we were finishing our escape craft, the first of the Marauder ships was sighted."The screen showed a single advance scout, long and black and deadly-looking, flashing into the blue rays of the Vega system.A cloud of squarish battlecraft from the other worlds rose to meet it, but the black ship easily evaded them and disappeared in the direction from which it had come."Plainly our system was to be the next victim.We had no more time to lose.So we manned our two ships and took off."Nelson watched columns of men and women and children disappear into the interiors of the two great ships, while loads and loads of stores and things were crated in.Then, from their rocky valleys, the two towering spheres lifted slowly without sign of rocket or jet.They moved up in the sky and vanished.Kunosh continued."To travel between the stars takes more than the lifetime of any man.We could not build small ships and go.So what we did was to build two tiny worlds in which we could continue to live and work and have children while they traveled the long distances to safer regions of the heavens.Our trip across space took." he paused to mentally calculate his figures into terms Nelson could understand ".about three thousand of your terrestrial years."There were glimpses of life inside Deimos and Phobos as they moved together across the empty stretches of interstellar space [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]